French Polarity-Sensitive Items

[Has97] [Zan97]

Lexical entries for French polarity-sensitive items (n-word series and related), typed by the theory-neutral categories from Semantics.Polarity. Standard sentential negation lives in the sibling Fragments/French/Negation.lean; this file holds only the lexical reactives (operator/lexical-reactive split documented in Core/Lexical/NegMarker.lean).

The French n-word series

French personne, rien, jamais, plus originate as ordinary nouns or adverbs ('person', 'thing', 'ever', 'more') that grammaticalized into negative polarity items via the Jespersen cycle. In modern French they co-occur with ne (where ne is preserved): Je n'ai vu personne 'I haven't seen anyone', Il n'y a plus de pain 'There's no more bread'. In ne-drop registers, the n-word alone carries the negation: J'ai vu personne.

French negative concord is non-strict (n-words license each other and ne is droppable), so personne/rien carry licensor := some .antiAdditive — concord under a negative quantifier is anti-additive licensing at this grain — while jamais keeps the weak-NPI distribution of its ever face (questions). A typed model of the bipartite ne dependency would live in the substrate, not per-Fragment.

def French.PolarityItems.personne : Semantics.Polarity.Item

personne — N-word for human ('nobody'). Grammaticalized from the noun 'person'. Co-occurs with ne in formal French; stands alone in colloquial ne-drop registers.

Equations

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def French.PolarityItems.rien : Semantics.Polarity.Item

rien — N-word for non-human ('nothing'). Grammaticalized from a Latin noun 'thing'. Same distribution as personne.

Equations

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def French.PolarityItems.jamais : Semantics.Polarity.Item

jamais — Temporal n-word ('never'). Grammaticalized from 'ever'. Pre-Jespersen jamais was a positive indefinite; modern jamais is the negative, requiring ne-licensing in formal register.

Equations

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def French.PolarityItems.plus : Semantics.Polarity.Item

plus — Temporal/quantitative n-word ('no more', 'no longer'). Same lexeme as positive plus 'more'; the negative reading requires co-occurrence with ne (or ne-drop register) and contextual triggering.

Equations

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Joint

def French.PolarityItems.items : List Semantics.Polarity.Item

The French polarity-item inventory: the Fragment-side joint listing every polarity item this fragment defines.

Equations

• French.PolarityItems.items = [French.PolarityItems.personne, French.PolarityItems.rien, French.PolarityItems.jamais, French.PolarityItems.plus]

Verification

theorem French.PolarityItems.french_licensing_sound (e : Semantics.Polarity.Item) : e ∈ items → ∀ c ∈ e.licensingContexts, c.licenses e

Every attested context of every entry is predicted licensed.